Sundance
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CULTURE HACKER: A STORYTELLING PANDEMIC
Originally printed in our Winter 2011 issue, grab a free issue of Filmmaker at Sundance to be a part of Pandemic 1.o. When the phone rings I’m feeling a bit nervous. The voice on the other end is slow and calculated. “We can do 30,000 but it will take 10 weeks. In order to get it in time for Sundance we need to order 500,000 and ship from China… We’re going to have to find another way.” Not quite your normal Sundance prep conversation, especially when the items in question are bottles of water. But these are not regular bottles […]
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Sundance 2011 Competition Lineup Announced
The Sundance Institute announced today the competition films for its 2011 edition of the Sundance Film Festival. At first glance, it looks like an exciting list with quite a few filmmakers we follow here at the magazine premiering their work, including Rashaad Ernesto Green’s Gun Hill Road, Sean Durkin’s Martha Marcy May Marlene, Andrew Okpeaha MacLean’s On the Ice, Dee Rees’ Pariah, Azazel Jacobs’ Terri and Marshall Curry’s If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front to name just a few. In the release sent out today, festival director John Cooper commented, ““The Festival is a challenge […]
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“THE RED CHAPEL”‘S MADS BRUGGER | By Alicia Van Couvering
When Danish Zentropa director Mads Brugger decided to take himself and two Korean-Danish comedians to North Korea under the guise of a fake comedy project, he employed what he thought might be the magic word for repressive regimes seeking international image burnishing: “cultural exchange.” The film opens with a shot of Brugger, lying on a hotel bed, calmly reading Kim Jong-Il’s official Instruction Manual for Film Directing. The secret police who watched this footage every night apparently had no objection. What they somehow did not expect or anticipate was that Brugger would one day turn this footage into a feature […]
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“DADDY LONGLEGS”‘ JOSH AND BENNY SAFDIE | By Scott Macaulay
When I was asked by The Huffington Post to comment on New York movies premiering in Sundance, the first film that popped into my mind was Josh and Bennie Safdie’s Daddy Longlegs. Now, as you may know, I’m a big fan of the Safdie brothers, selecting Josh for our 25 New Faces for the film he directed, The Pleasure of Being Robbed in 2008. That picture is a delightfully freewheeling romance of sorts involving a young woman, played with depth and originality by Eleonore Hendricks, who casually steals, not out of maliciousness or for greed but simply because of a […]
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Banksy Revealed? Parsing a Sundance Mystery
Sundance documentaries have developed a strong track record. Hits out of recent festivals include Man on Wire, The Cove and We Live in Public, each of which captures an element of society and finds the human connection within. This year, however, the human connection in some of the more talked about nonfiction entries is highly suspect. At the center it all: Banksy. Exit Through the Gift Shop, the alleged directorial debut of the anonymous street British street artist, wound up with a surprise slot in the Spectrum section of the festival. Banksy’s enigmatic career and life beyond the film world […]
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“HIS AND HERS”‘ KEN WALDROP | By Alicia Van Couvering
Ken Waldrop’s His & Hers is a documentary focusing on 70 women from the Irish Midlands, arranged chronologically from age 0 to 90, telling small stories about their lives. Irish Midlands women, being funny, sarcastic, charming and warm, are good subjects; Waldrop knew that because he grew up the son of one of very funny and sarcastic Irish Midlands mother. He constructed the film to mirror his own mother’s life; the women speak of their marriages in their twenties, their sons, and, finally, their husbands and these men’s deaths. Some of the interviews are about tiny things (who controls the […]
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“THE ROMANTICS”‘ GALT NIEDERHOFFER | By Alicia Van Couvering
Galt Niederhoffer is no stranger to Sundance, having produced films that won awards there beginning in 1997, when Morgan J. Freeman’s Hurricane Streets won the Audience Award. As a founding member of Plum Pictures, one of New York’s most active independent film production companies, she has produced over a dozen films, including Grace is Gone, Dedication, Prozac Nation, Lonesome Jim, The Winning Season, The Baxter and After.Life. Niederhoffer grew up in New York, one of six daughters of a squash champion-turned-hedge fund maverick, in a rambling, eccentrically decorated house. In her first novel, A Taxonomy of Barnacles, Niederhoffer may have […]
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“RUSSIAN LESSONS” | co-director, Andrei Nekrasov
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Tuesday, Jan. 26, 9:00 pm — Temple Theatre, Park City] The most difficult decision was the one to expose the mistakes of fellow film and TV program makers. The related question is why I decided to do it. There were two reasons for that. Firstly those mistakes were instrumental to the justification of an unjust war; secondly in many instances there were grounds to doubt that those mistakes were innocent. In other words, those mistakes were probably lies. To me personally they were shocking because I’d seen with my own eyes what havoc Russian bombs wrecked in the […]
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“ODDSAC” | director, Daniel Perez
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Tuesday, Jan. 26, 8:30 pm — Prospector Square Theatre, Park City] Deciding not to do a tour documentary on the band, which was what was first proposed. I have strong feelings about the distance between performer and audience, and I didn’t want to contribute anything more to this gap. I wanted to make something that I would be psyched to see and here it is. That and deciding which kid to kill in a scene were pretty difficult. In the end it was a combination of his hair and fake blood that did it.
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“ALL MY FRIENDS ARE FUNERAL SINGERS” | writer-director, Tim Rutili
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Tuesday, Jan. 26, 9:00 pm — New Frontier on Main, Park City] The most difficult decisions on our film were made in the editing process and had to do with balancing music, tangent and story. We had one scene in particular that looked great and had a really good friend of mine and her son acting in it. Everywhere we placed the scene in our movie seemed to throw it out of balance or clutter the narrative. The last thing I wanted to do was lose some of those shots, and I especially didn’t want to cut my […]
